Maternal Gestational Diabetes Is Associated With Genome-wide DNA Methylation Variation In Placenta And Cord Blood Of Exposed Offspring

g.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from 2 Exposure of a developing fetus to maternal gestational diabetes (GDM) has been shown to programme future risk of diabetes and obesity. Epigenetic variation in fetal tissue may have a mechanistic role in metabolic disease programming through interaction of the pregnancy environment with gene function. We aimed to identify genome-wide DNA methylation variation in cord blood and placenta from offspring born to mothers with and without GDM. Pregnant women of South Asian origin were studied and fetal tissues sampled at term delivery. The Illumina HumanMethylation450 BeadChip was used to assay genome-wide DNA methylation in placenta and cord blood from 27 GDM exposed and 21 unexposed offspring. We identified 1485 cord blood and 1708 placenta methylation variable positions (MVPs) achieving genome-wide significance (adjusted P-value <0.05) with methylation differences of>5%. MVPs wer